The Clouded Hills

by Brenda Jagger

  And in the moment before we entered that illuminated space, tension gripped him suddenly, painfully, and he said, ‘Tell me, Verity – tell me—’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘And, then – and then? More than that—’

  ‘I love you best – much more than anyone else.’

  ‘Than anyone?’

  ‘Yes, yes – more than I could ever love anyone.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, the taut pressure of his nerves sighing out of him. ‘So – come then, my darling, I’ll take you across the way to the Swan and teach you how to lie.’

  The square had emptied now, a light wind tasting of ash and the memory of burning stirring the debris underfoot, reminding me of a ballroom, forlorn with departed gaiety, but the Swan still sat there in its accustomed place, humming and glowing with good cheer, ready to cater all night long to the appetites of those who were prepared to – pay. Walking now a polite distance away from me; with no greater familiarity than a solicitous hand beneath my elbow as I negotiated the mess in the inn yard, Crispin – saw me safely bestowed in a back parlour, procured the landlady to attend me, and then, with apparent coolness, mounted the stairs to find Joel and inform him of my plight.

  ‘Barforth, dear fellow, if I might have a word – yes, I daresay I am the last man you expected to see here tonight, and no – very civil of you, but I won’t take anything just now. The fact is – well, your wife – no harm done as it turns out, although there could have been – by God, there could have been. Caught up in that little spot of bother it seems, on her way home from your sister’s– my step-mother’s. Damned coachman couldn’t see his way through; took fright and made her get down. Some fool’s notion of picking her up at the top of Millergate, if she ever got there, which of course she didn’t. Exactly, Barforth – that’s the very word I’d have used myself. Found her in Cropper Alley – yes, that’s right, Cropper Alley – could have been the great Wall of China for all she knew. Absolutely worn out and a bit shaken, but luckily I got to her before anybody else, and she’s downstairs with Mrs Parkin. What you do to your coachman, of course, is your own affair, but I expect you’ll be taking Mrs Barforth home.’

  And hearing the light, drawling note of his voice as they came downstairs together, my mind turned rogue again and I was very near to laughter.

  ‘By Christ, Verity,’ Joel said from the doorway, appalled, I think, by the mud-splattered hem of my dress, my fouled slippers, my bare, quite dirty feet at ease on Mrs Parkin’s good stool. And I thought: How big he is – how dark – basic colours, black and red and great bands of gold compared to Crispin, behind him, turquoise and lilac and misty, muted shades blending his personality together like a spring evening.

  But I said, with great composure, ‘Yes, I am in a state, which is hardly to be wondered at, and I would like very much to go home.’

  He had, of course, been drinking for hours, was as drunk as he ever permitted himself to be, but he was steady on his feet and decisive in his movements as he turned away from me to Crispin, wanting to be rid of him, I thought, since he had no mind to scold me, or whatever he meant to do, before strangers.

  ‘I am very much obliged to you, Aycliffe.’

  ‘Oh, my pleasure – really – absolutely my pleasure, you may believe me.’

  As they shook hands and Crispin bowed slightly towards me in leave-taking, I was aware once again of laughter welling up inside me and stifled it instantly, knowing that if Joel heard it and ever discovered the cause he would kill me for it.

  And why, I wondered, did I have so little care for that? Why did I refuse, obstinately, to bow myself with shame and terror when my position was both shameful and terrifying?

  ‘You are quite sure,’ Joel said, coming towards me, ‘that no one harmed you – quite sure?’

  ‘Why, yes. No one spoke to me at all. I was pushed and jostled a little but no more than anyone else, and I hope you do not mean to blame me for it. I stayed late with your sister because she was in her miseries again, and when Thomas told me to get down and walk to Millergate, I could see the sense to it.’

  ‘Sense? There was no sense at all. He should have brought you here or stayed where he was until the crowd dispersed, or forced himself a way through – they’d have stood back soon enough when they saw it was either that or being ridden down. But, in any case, you are not to blame – bedraggled little sparrow that you are – and I will deal with Thomas later. Come now, I’ll take you home.’

  ‘There’s no need to take me. Just send a message and they’ll come to fetch me. Don’t leave your guests on my account.’

  ‘My guests will do very well without me for an hour or two. Just throw those shoes into Mrs Parkin’s fire, for I’ll not have them in my phaeton, and we’ll be on our way. Come – if you had less than six inches of mud on your skirt I’d carry you, but – evening clothes costing what they do you’ll have to manage as best you may.’

  But he lifted me a step or two, just the same, across the splinters of charred wood, the brim of what had been a silk hat wedged grotesquely among them, warning me all the while to keep my muck away from his trousers, and, as he tossed me up into the phaeton, I was still happy, still blissfully, gloriously lost to reason. I felt intensely alive, rich and beautiful and clever, my senses and appetites sharpened so that colours seemed brighter, sounds clearer, champagne or spring water equally delightful, and I could have rolled myself in the summer grasses, as young animals do, from sheer joy in living. And, my mood extending to Joel, I wondered if he felt this exultation when he had been with a woman he desired; and then, abruptly, I pitied him, for Joel, who wanted to possess the whole world, had surely never possessed this. Joel, I was quite certain, had never been in love in his whole life. How could his restless desires, his conquests and his triumphs compare with the emotion I was feeling now?

  Poor, magnificent, all-powerful Joel. And pitying him – still too dazed with joy to understand that I had cause enough to pity myself – I could feel the reserve I had always felt towards him melt away and I could accept him, value him, exactly as he was.

  ‘Thomas goes in the morning,’ he said, taking a corner dangerously, setting the dust flying. ‘Or he goes tonight, if I catch him.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll not mind that. He’s old and ready to go to Patterswick to live with his sister – and he’s heartily sick of me.’

  ‘Is he, by God.’

  ‘Yes. I was in the square, Joel. I saw the bonfire, and I saw you raise your glass to them afterwards.’

  ‘Did you?’ he said, his smile flashing out as it had in the inn yard. ‘And what did you think of that, little cousin?’

  Smiling too and closer to him in some odd, quite terrible way than I had ever been before, I answered, ‘I’ll tell you cousin – I thought I had never liked you so well before in my life.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  My mother, being desirous of inspecting the site of our new property at Tarn Edge, had arranged to meet me there the following day and to take me back to Patterswick with her for tea, an expedition which should have given me ample opportunity for a private conversation had not Hannah announced at breakfast, ‘I think I had better come with you, Verity. In fact, I think Mr Ashley would expect it of me on such a pleasant day.’

  While I finished my tea and toast and ran upstairs for my bonnet, our numbers were again increased, first by Elinor driving up at a spanking pace and calling out, ‘My miseries are entirely gone. What – are you going to Patterswick? Excellent – I’ll join you, for I hear you had an adventure last night and you can tell me on the way,’ and then by young Jonas Agbrigg, who, coming to return a book Hannah had lent him, eagerly accepted her offer of a drive.

  ‘You can take Jonas up with you, Verity, and I will ride with Elinor,’ Hannah decided. Since the introduction of Jonas Agbrigg filled Blaize, then Nicholas, then Caroline with an overwhelming desire to come too, I set out surrounded by children while my two cousins followed behind, in the Aycliffe
carriage, most comfortably alone.

  It was a day of great heat, a blue and gold sky, a thirsty land gasping between the intense reds and yellows of summer flowers, the moorland spiky and crackling underfoot although I had not walked there that morning. And still – my crime already a day old, my body having accommodated Joel’s waking desire that morning quite automatically, my mind making little of it, my mouth having smiled and lied as I repeated the story of my escapade to Hannah, to Mrs Stevens, to Elinor, as I would go on repeating it to the many who would ask – still I was happy. And if this mindless, girlish bliss – these symptoms of first love – were ridiculous in a woman of twenty-six, three times a mother, then I was content to be ridiculous. And if they were dangerous – as they undoubtedly were – then, when the time came, I would suffer. And, amazed, amused even at my own recklessness, I smiled at every passerby, even at young Jonas Agbrigg beside me in the carriage, and asked him, ‘How is your mother, dear?’ although I did not like him and knew that, to him at twelve years of age, his ailing mother was an embarrassment, a nuisance.

  ‘She’s very well, ma’am,’ he answered dourly, although I knew she had taken to wandering lately, suddenly not being there when, just a moment ago, she had been quietly in her accustomed place.

  ‘A tremendous anxiety,’ Hannah had told me. ‘She was on Cullingford Green two days ago and had to be fetched home on a tatter’s cart, and last week Mr Blamires of the grammar school met her on the road above Lawcroft: she had no idea where she was going – was ready, in fact, to go anywhere with anyone, like a stray dog. Fortunately Mr Blamires recognized her and took her back to Low Cross, but eventually she is bound to encounter someone who will be differently disposed and one trembles to think what, may happen then. For her own safety she ought to be restrained – no, no, not with chains, you silly goose, although it would come to that, I fear, if her husband could not afford to care for her at home. I mean simply that they should lock her door and bar her window, but Mr Agbrigg will not hear of it. He looked as shocked as you when I suggested it. Yet what else is to be done? Is she to be left to walk under somebody’s horses, or into the canal – for I declare she has no more sense of danger than a toddling child – or to fall into the hands of some villain who would take advantage of her? It would give me no pleasure to turn the key in her door, but I assure you that, when I consider the alternatives, I would force myself to do it.’

  As I looked at Ann Agbrigg’s clever son, scuffling with my own children for what seemed to them the best place in the carriage, I wondered if it had shamed him when Mr Blamires, his headmaster, had brought his mother home, and if he too would be willing to turn that key.

  The surviving Agbrigg girl, Maria, was of little interest to Hannah; a quiet little thing who could do nothing more exciting than sew a straight seam. But the boy Jonas, as plain as his sister, as long and angular and yellow-pale as his father, had a sharpness of intellect – altogether above his station – which had quickly claimed her notice.

  A graceless boy, Jonas, sullen and secretive, who had fallen foul of his teachers in the early days until Mr Blamires – most discerning of headmasters – had taken Hannah aside and – confided in her that Jonas, far from having difficulty in keeping up with his socially superior classmates, had so far surpassed them that, in some cases, even the masters were finding it impossible to keep up with him,

  ‘Mr Blamires was quite taken aback,’ she in her turn confided in me. ‘Naturally, every master dreams of a brilliant pupil, but considering the thousands of pounds the Hobhouses and Oldroyds – and the Barforths, of course – have given the school, the poor man was very much alarmed at seeing all the prizes go to an Agbrigg. I sympathized, of course – who would not? – but I was quick to make Mr Blamires aware that no suggestion of holding Jonas back could find favour with me. After all, one never knows what a boy like that may do in the future – what heights he may reach – and how would one feel then if one had not encouraged him?’

  Since that day, Hannah had set herself the task of encouraging Jonas Agbrigg as much as she could, earning herself a place perhaps in his memoirs should he ever achieve greatness, while he had attached himself to her good graces with a willingness that made me suspect he was neither so – unworldly nor so unpolished as he seemed. A calculating child, I thought, unlike my own sons, who lived like greedy butterflies from one sunbeam to the next, unlike my daughter, who thought the world existed for her pleasure, unlike my own children altogether, who were, just then, causing the alien Jonas so much discomfort with, their jostling for position that Hannah called out, ‘Verity, can you not keep those children in order? They will have Jonas out on the road ere long if they are not checked.’

  ‘It’s our carriage,’ Blaize said, clear-eyed and innocent, knowing Hannah could not hear him.

  ‘It’s our road as well,’ Nicholas muttered, compelled to go one better, not caring whether Hannah heard him or not.

  ‘And I don’t like him,’ Caroline declared. ‘He smells.’

  And although the odour Jonas exuded was that of good, cheap soap, nothing to be ashamed of, the look in his pale, slightly uptilted eyes would have worried me had she been older or more available to his spite.

  My mother was waiting for us at Tarn Edge, in Squire Dalby’s open landau, chatting to Daniel Adair, the Aycliffe manager, who may have had business on the site or may simply have made it his business to be there, since he was a man who enjoyed an audience, particularly of women. And as he helped us down and began to tell us where my drawing room would be and to explain the proposed width and magnificence of my hall, it struck me that one did not often see an Irishman, in these parts, in such a perfect state of health.

  He was a man of thirty-five, not tall but square-cut, powerful, with a perpetually smiling mouth and a merry eye, quick to spot its own advantage; a man who, having been instructed by Morgan Aycliffe simply to run the business at a profit and no questions asked, could be relied on, one felt, to feather his own nest with a kind of good humoured rapacity that would make him popular, even among those he robbed. And although he very likely believed that young women were fit for nothing but bed and breeding, while old ones should be firmly anchored to washtub and kitchen stove, nothing could have exceeded the gallantry of his escort, the courteous tilt of his head as he listened to Hannah’s questions, the clarity of his replies, the twinkle in his eye as he let himself be discovered looking at Elinor and me, and even my mother, in a way that said, ‘Naturally I could never presume to touch, for I’m just a common man, but I’d like to – I’d really like to.’

  I stood a little apart, for I had been here often enough before and knew the dimensions of the house, the distance from the mill, how a high stone wall and a future circle of trees would screen – me from the unpleasantness of factory life; how, in fact, the firm of Morgan Aycliffe, master builders, would assist me to turn my back on the factory altogether by giving my front windows a view of open fields and a stretch of unblemished sky above them. I knew that I was to have a thick hedge of rhododendrons around my wall, sweet-scented shrubs and half an acre of roses to take the factory smells from my air, a paddock for my children to race their ponies with another wall around it, massive gates and a gatekeeper, and more trees to ensure my privacy. I knew it was to be not just a house, or a home, but a palace for an industrious industrial prince, with myself, his gracious, perfectly mannered consort, inside it.

  And I knew I would be that consort. I would give him everything he asked of me, as I had always done, because I could see no other way. I would be obedient and sensible and crafty, and what I could not have by right, would get, like any other bondswoman, by stealth.

  ‘What are you dreaming of?’ my mother asked, gliding up to me in her fluid fashion. Then, catching the drift of something in my face with which she did not wish to involve herself, she said quickly, ‘I have the feeling Hannah is in no hurry to see the completion of this house. I suppose your removal from Lawcroft must force her to cons
ider her own position. If she intends to marry Mr Ashley she should certainly name the day, for there seems little point in moving up here with you only to remove again to Patters – wick. Mr Ashley is entirely at her disposal – would not dare, I imagine, to be otherwise. Will she marry him, do you think? They tell me Mr Brand has entered the lists once again, Is he, after-all, likely to succeed?’

  Indeed, Mr Brand, fully recovered from the fever by: now and fully aware of what Hannah’s loss was costing him in time and effort, had taken to calling on me lately, planting himself squarely in my drawing room at teatime, or any other time he could find an excuse to call, and bewailing not Hannah’s, engagement to Mr Ashley but her conversion to the Church of England which it entailed.

  ‘It is her soul, Mrs Barforth – her bright, pure soul.’

  Yet I didn’t think that Mr Brand, as he swallowed his tea and his emotion, was really thinking of Hannah’s soul. He wanted her in bed with him, I believed, and the mother of half a dozen red-headed, earthbound children just like himself, and if she meant to become a parsonage wife at all – and I had yet to be convinced of it – I thought she would be more comfortable with him than the ethereal Mr Ashley.

  But – and I could not have explained this to Mr Brand – it was not really Mr Ashley, at the moment, who stood between them, nor Morgan Aycliffe, either, but the simple matter of Jonas Agbrigg’s education.

  ‘Jonas must go to Oxford or Cambridge,’ she had decreed. His calibre demands it. And since only members of the established Church of England were eligible for these ancient seats of learning, it followed – in her view – that Jonas must give up his Methodism and be received, by Mr Ashley, into the Anglican fold.